Sources

The Illinois Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday regarding the appeal of Sangamon County Judge Steven Nardulli's March 19 ruling, which found that retirees' state-subsidized health insurance is not a constitutionally-protected pension benefit.

Sources

The U.S. House is moving forward with a plan to simultaneously fund the federal government and defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to a Wednesday announcement by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH,8).

The Speaker says the most conservative members of his caucus have made it clear that they will not relent on their attempts to get rid of the health care reform bill, even if it results in a government shutdown.

With a slogan that reads “I want to marry you in Minneapolis”, the city's mayor, R.T. Rybak, unveiled a Chicagoland ad campaign on
Thursday urging the city's LGBTQ couples to make the six-hour drive
to the City of Lakes to get legally married.

"Chicago is
my kind of town, but it's a second city in human rights. Right now, that
gives a tremendous competitive advantage to Minneapolis,” said Rybak,
who announced the campaign from the roof of the Center On Halsted, at 3656 N. Halsted St., a community center catered to LGBTQ Chicagoans in the heart of the Boystown neighborhood.

“The
people who built this neighborhood, who have done so much incredible
work in this community, you deserve equal rights,” he said. “Come to
Minnesota, a place that recognizes that you already should have those
rights."

Activists from the African and LGBT communities joined forces to hold
a teach-in Saturday to discuss how efforts to overhaul U.S. immigration
policy negatively affect their communities.

At issue are the diversity visa lottery program and the Uniting American Families Act
(UAFA). Both programs provided a legal pathway for Africans and
foreign-born gay spouses to come to the U.S. But the U.S. Senate bill eliminates the diversity visa program when it passed its version of the immigration bill back in June, and the UAFA was cut from the legislation.

Kim Hunt, executive director of Affinity Community Service (ACS),
said the Senate could have passed “a really good bill” if it did not
throw a lot of people under the bus, including the LGBT community. ACS
is a social justice organization advocating for the Black LGBTQ
community.

Illinois pro-choice activists and others across the country are making the call for “abortion on demand and without apology.”

More
than a dozen demonstrators gathered near Michigan Avenue and Congress
Parkway over the weekend to promote that message as part of the
cross-country ‘Abortion Rights Freedom Ride’ tour, which stopped in Chicago on Saturday.

Members of the national organization End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women, or StopPatriarchy.org,
kicked off the freedom ride July 23 in New York City and San Francisco.
They will travel to at least 14 cities by August 21. The goal of the
freedom ride is to push back against the reversal of abortion and birth
control rights being seen across the country and to protect those on the
front lines who provide abortions.

Chicago resident Martha Conrad,
62, is one local activist who will trek to other key abortion
battleground states as part of the freedom ride. Conrad called it
“shocking and horrible” that women still have to fight for their rights
and reproductive freedom.

“We need people from all generations and
all nationalities to step up,” Conrad said. “If we do not, women will
not be free ... Women have been the
chattel property and the breeders of children for many centuries, and we
don’t want to go back to that.”

A
wave of disappointment from pro-choice and women rights advocates
rocked Illinois earlier this month after the state Supreme Court upheld a law that requires doctors to inform a parent before those younger
than 18 can get an abortion.

“It puts our teens in danger, and our whole pro-choice community is very sad about that,” said Benita Ulisano, co-chair of the Illinois Choice Action Team.

The state’s high court found Illinois’ Parental Notice of
Abortion Act of 1995, which has never been implemented due to legal
challenges, to be constitutional. By a 7-0 vote, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a previous
circuit court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit filed back in
2009 that challenged the law.

For years, the ACLU of Illinois has been at
the front lines in the battle against the state’s notification law
and represented the plaintiffs in the case, which included Granite
City’s Hope Clinic for Women and the director of the University of
Illinois at Chicago's Center for Reproductive Health.

“This
dangerous law was passed by the legislature nearly 20 years ago relying
on outdated, ideological and unsupported assumptions about the purported
harms of abortion, which have been shown to be inaccurate,” Lorie Chaiten, ACLU’s reproductive rights project director, said in a statement after
the court’s decision.

Dozens
of pro-choice Chicago activists assembled at Daley Plaza Monday evening
to show their solidarity with Texas women who will be impacted by a
restrictive abortion measure the state’s Republican-controlled
legislature passed Friday.

The fight for women’s reproductive
freedom in Illinois is also far from over, the protestors stressed. Last
week, Illinois’ Supreme Court deemed a controversial 1995 state law constitutional. The law requires doctors
to notify a parent before those under the age of 18 can get an abortion. The law, which has never been implemented, will start
being enforced August 15.

“I know I am not alone in feeling
extremely dispirited after the weekend ... a weekend in which we were told
that [as] women our voices don’t matter, our needs don’t matter in the
discussion about our own lives and about what kind of health care we can
access,” Corinne Westing, a Chicago registered nurse and newly-certified nurse midwife, told the more than 50 protestors.